The mass shootings at the Washington Navy Yard bring home to roost, once again, our nation’s unwillingness or inability to address its flawed mental health system.

Some critics of President Barack Obama took the opportunity to use the tragedy for political snark, responding to Obama’s prior statement that the late Trayvon Martin could have been his son. They wisecracked that the late Aaron Alexis, the Washington Navy Yard shooter, could have been Obama’s son, too.

But it’s true. Around the country, millions of parents of adult children who suffer from serious mental illnesses are at a complete loss as to how to help them. Because their kids are adults, they have no power to involuntarily commit them to institutions where they could be treated.

Instead, bridges get burned as exhausted families make the gut-wrenching choice to distance themselves, just to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

ONE-TWO PUNCH

The mere suggestion of involuntary commitment triggers concerns about civil liberties, but the government imprisons mentally ill people against their will all the time. The jails are filled with people who have no business being there, but are there by virtue of misbehavior triggered by their illnesses.

As for civil rights, don’t other citizens have an equal and reasonable right of expectation to go to work, school, church or the movies without becoming mass-murder victims?

Disturbingly, the shelf life of outrage and grief over mass shootings grows ever shorter with each incident. Like Virginia Tech, Aurora, the Sikh murders and Sandy Hook Elementary School, hand-wringing over this latest incident also will pass — if it hasn’t already. Hours after the Navy Yard shootings occurred, the makers of Grand Theft Auto V, a video game that showcases murder and hijacking, reported $800 million in sales in one day, and no one uttered a word about the insensitivity of the timing.

What’s happening isn’t simply about guns and American culture’s unhealthy love affair with violence; it’s also about economics. According to a 2012 report by The Washington Post, mental health treatment is a multibillion-dollar industry that is being dwarfed by the need for services and hamstrung by outdated attitudes about mental illness. Exacerbating the crisis is $1.8 billion in state-level budget cuts that began in the 1980s, coupled with policies to deinstitutionalize mental health treatment. It has been a one-two punch, resulting in fewer public inpatient facilities and less access to treatment.

Where people have a support system in place, outpatient treatment has been largely successful, but that’s scant comfort to families who are waylaid by loss because someone they loved died at the hand of someone who lacks such support.

NOT ENOUGH

Though he had family, Alexis also had numerous documented cases of misconduct with guns and problems with discipline. Police in Newport, R.I., even notified the Navy of its concerns when Alexis, a contractor, suffered what appeared to be a psychotic episode at a Newport hotel while on a work assignment.

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Last week, the National Alliance on Mental Illness urged Congress to pass three bipartisan proposals that were introduced on the heels of last year’s shootings in Newtown, Conn.

NAMI also is calling for more community-based crisis intervention teams, which already exist in 2,800 cities; more mental health courts for people accused of nonviolent offenses; and more public education about mental health and its treatment.

To do nothing does not save money. To do nothing is the same as saying that despite the steady rise in mass shootings, we haven’t had enough.